I’ve pre-ordered the game, and as such I got early access to the game… Unfortunately for me, I was travelling abroad when I got the invite, so I could only try the game on Saturday (instead of Thursday)… Anyway, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday playing it, so here are some first impressions about the game.
First of all, before I start bitching about the game, let me just say that I’m having a lot of fun playing it… It’s a good game, on par with “Knights of the Old Republic” but in a massive setting! Any Star Wars fan that likes games (of the MMORPG and normal variety) should definitely pick it up!
The game’s well written, with interesting storylines, excellent graphics (besides some occasional bugs), cool battle system and lightsabers! What more can you ask for?
In a world without World of Warcraft, this game would be freaking amazing… Unfortunately for them, there is such a thing as WoW, and comparisons are drawn.
Is it fair we do these comparisons? Shouldn’t a game stand on its own merits? That’s a tricky question… WoW created what most of us considered the baseline, with most of the semantics we’re used to tackle, and as such, he has provided us even the language in which we discuss this and other MMORPGs.
On the other hand, more than in any gamming scenario, MMORPGs are in direct competition with each other… They are huge time drains (they’re designed that way), and a normal person can’t sanely play two MMORPGs at the same time (and be any good at them)… Every hour I spend in SWTOR is an hour I can’t spend in WoW, it’s not like a single player game which I finish and then move to the next one.
So, regardless of fairness, the comparisons are indispensable to understand and to analyze the potential of the game.
Although SWTOR is a very good game, fun and all that, it has some downsides that really detract from the experience. I feel some “rushing” in the development of the game, because some obvious things that shouldn’t be so hard to put in are absent, especially if you’re trying to be a WoW killer:
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Queue times: While the massive success of WoW was a huge surprise for Blizzard (some people referred they got 10 times more people they expected in the first two months), the success of SWTOR shouldn’t have come as a surprise (with over 2.5 million pre-orders). So, is it too much to ask for enough servers to not have 30 min queues to play? That should have been anticipated and active steps should have done to prevent it!
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Terrible UI design: I admit that the WoW UI has spoiled us, but some mistakes in the SWTOR UI aren’t excusable… There’s no UI scale system, so people like me that play in a big television at 1920×1080 get very small icons to press and some almost ineligible text!
That’s not the only problem of the UI, mind you… For example, if you expand your companion’s action bar (to take more direct actions with it), it expands on top of your second skill bar, which seems like extremely dumb! No target-of-target display, no way to keep track of agro and damage meters to understand how your performance is actually affected by different skill rotations, these are a few elements that are missing from the game.
I could forgive these flaws (like I did in WoW when it launched), if the game included an add-on system (one of the strengths of WoW, to be honest), but although they are still considering if they’re going to add one, I don’t think it is likely. -
Terrible social tools… Guild administration panel is buggy like hell (excusable, MMORPGs are always full of bugs), you can’t whisper someone just by clicking their name either in guild chat or party or whatever, that kind of things… Lots of things seem to be only accessible through command line commands (haven’t figured out how to invite someone to a party, except by using /invite command)
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Lack of auto-targeting… In a melee heavy game, the target should change to another one as soon as the current one dies. But it doesn’t… and with the sound of the lightsabers, you don’t actually hear your target dying (and are watching cooldowns to be really paying attention to the visuals), so sometimes you’re just pressing buttons and wondering why they aren’t having any effect…
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Companion-based gathering and crafting system… Mixed feeling about this, but I know people that will get pissed… My wife, for example, likes gathering skills to relax while playing… The game doesn’t allow for it, at least not in any useful form (with loads of bugs in the gathering nodes)… Would be cool to be able to join the companion on the missions to gather materials for crafting, though… Wonder why they didn’t add that option…
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Light/dark alignment thingy… While an interesting idea, in practice it doesn’t allow you a choice, because in some cases you’d like to go “dark”, and others you’d like to go “light”, but if you do so, you won’t reach the levels of light and dark that actually have rewards… So you tend to choose one and keep doing it, instead of actually choosing what you feel like… If they added items for the neutral ground, that might fix this issue (gear of Revan, it would make sense for neutral people).
As I said, this is just some general first impressions with about 18 hours of playing (including trying to fix a crappy problem with my wife’s laptop… the low-end Intel HD3000 video card wasn’t being switched to the high-end Radeon that the laptop has for high-performance graphics automatically, had to find how to do it manually).
I’ll keep on playing and add some more comments about the game as I go along… Got holidays coming for the next two weeks, so lots of play time (even with Christmas and some stuff I want to do with Grey).